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This work adopts the premise that the metatheoretical debates about positivists and post-positivists have reached an impasse; it suggests that an approach driven by theoretical reflexivity offers a basis on which alternative understandings of international relations can be developed.

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Since its publication in 1982, Beyond Positivism has become established as one of the definitive statements on economic methodology. The book’s rejection of positivism and its advocacy of pluralism were to have a profound influence in the flowering of work methodology that has taken place in economics in the decade since its publication. This edition contains a new preface outlining the major developments in the area since the book’s first appearance. The book provides the first comprehensive treatment of twentieth century philosophy of science which emphasizes the issues relevant to economics. It proceeds to demonstrate this relevance by reviewing some of the key debates in the area. Having concluded that positivism has to be rejected, the author examines possible alternative bases for economic methodology. Arguing that there is no best method, he advocates methodological pluralism.

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Laudan argues that the debate between positivists and post-positivist relativists can only be resolved by seeing that these unacceptable positions rest on the same unexamined set of assumptions. By targeting and critiquing these assumptions, he lays the groundwork for a post-positivist philosophy of science that does not provide aid and comfort to the enemies of reason.

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Volume 36A of Research in the History of Economic Thought and Methodology features a symposium on Bruce Caldwell’s Beyond Positivism after 35 years. The volume also features general-research essays from Luis Mireles-Flores and Alain Marciano. Luca Fiorito presents a new discovery from the archives.

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This second volume in this new series aims to anchor the 21st century in the tradition of the new, to raise methodology into historiography. As the new millennium develops, it is becoming evident that science and society are critical pivots in the formation of a larger mosaic of culture and civilization. A tradition has developed and refuses to dissolve under the withering aspect of analysis. Whether flying under the banner of Arthur Lovejoy, George F. Kennan, Pitirim Sorokin, Arnold Toynbee, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, T. S. Eliot, Thorstein Veblen, and countless others, it has become clear that making sense of the whole, and not resting easy with bits and pieces has become the mission of Culture & Civilization. This second volume expands upon the initial efforts to deepen the sense of tradition, with outstanding contributions ranging from Charles Murray, The Happiness of the People; Peter Watson, Ideas: A History of Thought from Fire to Freud; Evan Selinger, Ethics and Poverty Tours; Walter A. McDougall, American Policy Traditions in the Middle East; Raymond Ibrahim, Violence in Judaism, Christianity and Islam; Michael Curtis, Israel: Land, Law, and Legitimacy; Marian Tupy, Persistent Poverty in Africa; David Ronfeldt and Danielle Varda, Cyberocracy Revisited; a retrospective by Leo Alexander on Medical Science under Dictatorship; and a series of brilliant new essays on Wyndham Lewis, Jonathan Swift, Max Scheler, and Thurman Arnold. Culture and Civilization does not embrace idiosyncratic visions of the apocalypse or the end of Western empires. It does attempt to bring together immediate issues and ideas that are substantial and challenging. The essential polarity between democracy and autocracy has now taken on historical dimensions that has now taken on larger, deeper dimensions in different political economic, and ecological terrain of our day is civilization versus barbarism. This second volume is a sober, deeper response to such a challenge.

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Illuminating the idea of legality by a consideration of its moral nature, this book explores the emergence and development of two rival traditions of legal thought (those of 'positivism' and 'idealism') which together define the structure of modern juridical thought. In doing so, it consciously departs from many of the tendencies and working assumptions that define modern legal philosophy. The book examines the shifts in thinking about the rule of law and the wider significance of law, brought about by changing conceptions of the nature of law: from an understanding of law in which the primary focus is on rights, to an articulation of the legal order as a body of deliberately posited rules, and finally to the present understanding of law as a systematic body of rules and principles underpinned by an abiding concern with individual rights. By exposing the historical and metaphysical underpinnings of these theoretical traditions, the book imparts an idea of their limitations and moves beyond the understandings offered within them of the nature of legality.

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The sciences are too important to be left exclusively to scientists, and indeed they have not been. The structure of scientific knowledge, the role of the sciences in society, the appropriate social contexts for the pursuit of scientific inquiry, have long been matters for reflection and debate about the sciences carried on both within academe and outside it. Even within the universities this reflection has not been the property of any single discipline. Philosophy might have been first in the field, but history and the social sciences have also entered the fray. For the latter, new problems came to the fore, since reflection on the sciences is, in the case of the social sciences, necessarily also reflection on themselves as sciences. Reflection on the natural sciences and self-reflection by the social sciences came to be dominated in the 1960s by the term 'positivism'. At the time when this word had been invented, the sciences were flourishing; their social and material environment had become increasingly favourable to scientific progress, and the sciences were pointing the way to an optimistic future. In the later twentieth century, however, 'positivism' came to be a word used more frequently by those less sure of nineteenth century certainties. In both sociology and philosophy, 'positivism' was now something to be rejected, and, symbolizing the collapse of an earlier consensus, it became itself the shibboleth of a new dissensus, as different groups of reflective thinkers, in rejecting 'positivism', rejected something different, and often rejected each other.

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Conklin's thesis is that the tradition of modern legal positivism, beginning with Thomas Hobbes, postulated different senses of the invisible as the authorising origin of humanly posited laws. Conklin re-reads the tradition by privileging how the canons share a particular understanding of legal language as written. Leading philosophers who have espoused the tenets of the tradition have assumed that legal language is written and that the authorising origin of humanly posited rules/norms is inaccessible to the written legal language. Conklin's re-reading of the tradition teases out how each of these leading philosophers has postulated that the authorising origin of humanly posited laws is an unanalysable externality to the written language of the legal structure. As such, the authorising origin of posited rules/norms is inaccessible or invisible to their written language. What is this authorising origin? Different forms include an originary author, an a priori concept, and an immediacy of bonding between person and laws. In each case the origin is unwritten in the sense of being inaccessible to the authoritative texts written by the officials of civil institutions of the sovereign state. Conklin sets his thesis in the context of the legal theory of the polis and the pre-polis of Greek tribes. The author claims that the problem is that the tradition of legal positivism of a modern sovereign state excises the experiential, or bodily, meanings from the written language of the posited rules/norms, thereby forgetting the very pre-legal authorising origin of the posited norms that each philosopher admits as offering the finality that legal reasoning demands if it is to be authoritative.

Scientism and Its Limits in Emile Hennequin, Wilhelm Scherer, and Dmitrii Pisarev

Author: Catherine LeGouis

Publisher: Bucknell University Press

ISBN: 9780838753231

Category: Philosophy

Page: 269

View: 8981

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"In this book, Catherine LeGouis examines the work of three nineteenth-century positivist critics, each of whom struggled to overcome the contradictions of attempting to separate esthetic, psychological, and sociological concerns from individual subjectivity." "These positivists - staunch believers in the authority of scientific reason inspired by Auguste Comte, J. S. Mill, and Hippolyte Taine - attempted to turn literary criticism into an exact science that would observe and explain not only the social context of literature, but also its esthetics, without recourse to subjectivity based on individual reactions." "The writings of Emile Hennequin, a French journalist, editor, and literary critic of the 1880s, exemplify the tensions between the positivists' drive to systematic literary criticism and the unfettered imagination inherent in literature." "Dmitrii Pisarev, a firebrand Russian literary critic of the 1860s and a younger colleague of the great Russian radicals Nikolai Chernyshevsky and Nikolai Dobroliubov, combines rigid positivism and a rejection of esthetics with great critical sensitivity and spectacular displays of imaginative literary skill." "From the mid-1860s to the mid-1880s, German philologist and critic Wilhelm Scherer, more doctrinaire than Hennequin or Pisarev, links linguistic development and national character." "The positivists proposed theoretical frameworks so rigid that they were impossibly impractical, which guaranteed that only with infusions of imagination could their systems attain any credibility. Their fascination with the impossibility of impersonal, absolute literary judgements paradoxically became their first surrender to subjective taste, for choosing a system, even one based on objectivity, is an exercise in subjectivity. Entranced by their self-defeating objective, the positivists failed to appreciate that subjectivity and imagination are not illusions to be expunged, but a valuable - and fundamental - part of reality."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

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A cross-disciplinary collection of 20 essays describing the journey to public scholarship, exploring the pleasures and perils associated with breaching the town-gown divide. Includes contributions from departments of geography, comparative literature, sociology, communications, history, English, public health, and biology Discusses their efforts to reach beyond the academy and to make their ideas and research broadly accessible to a wider audience Opens the way for a new kind of democratic politics—one based on grounded concepts and meaningful social participation Includes deeply personal accounts about the journey to becoming a public scholar and to intervening politically in the world, while remaining within a university system Provides a broad prescription for social change, both within and outside the university

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The philosophical unity so visible in Europe at the time of the Reformation and still perceptible during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries began to disintegrate in the early years of the nineteenth century. The accession of new languages to the status of scientific languages, the rise of nationalistically minded generations of philosophers, the progressive multiplication of the professors of philosophy, many of whom became philosophical writers, created a new historical situation. Descartes wrote his 'Meditations' in Latin, so they were read at once in the whole of civilized Europe; one hundred year later, Condillac could not read Locke in the original, and when Kant published his masterwork in German, it remained for many years a sort of mystery philosophy chiefly known from summaries, interpretations, and even criticisms. It is therefore almost unavoidable to take into account the nationalities of the philsophers in the nineteenth century and, up to a point at least, to order their doctrines accordingly. --from the Preface

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This book examines the nature of economic explanation. The author introduces current thinking in the philosophy of science and reviews the literature on methodology. He looks at the status of welfare economics, and also provides a series of case studies of leading economic controversies, showing how they may be illuminated by paying attention to questions of methodology. A final chapter draws the strands together and gives the author's view of what is wrong with modern economics. This book is a revised and updated edition of a classic work on the methodology of economics.

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This text, specifically for AQA specifications, is designed to be easy and encouraging for students to use. The book contains updated material and activities together with a new chapter on study skills. It also indicates clearly where activities meet the new evidence requirements for key skills.